Release
by carlyinrome
Summary: Buffy&Angel. If we work together, maybe we can get along. Spoilers through Not Fade Away. Written for Semby in Lee's Happy Endings Ficathon.


**Release **

**Part One: Someplace With a Broken Heart   
Colombo District, Sri Lanka, 2001**

"_You were looking for peace and quiet, so you came here?"_

Buffy stands at the window in a white cotton dress and bare feet, her hair pulled up off her neck. (She looks so beautiful like that, Angel thinks, watching her from the bed, but it's probably a dangerous choice of hairstyles around him, even after all this time. He wishes he could be safer for her, he wishes . . . well, he wishes he could make things different.) She's pulled back the curtains from the window as a concession to the heat, or to look out into the dark wild night, but Sri Lanka is miserably hot and humid even when the sun is down, and a sheen of sweat clings to every inch of her. Angel can almost smell it, can almost taste it, and he wants to press his lips to her febrile flesh, to let his tongue lap up the salty beads from between her shoulder blades, her collar bone, her navel, the dimples of her knees.

He's not sure where these thoughts come from, but they keep coming.

"I need somewhere quiet to reflect and heal—"

She turns back to him briefly. The movement, this movement, the turn of her neck isn't quite right, and he flinches without really being able to pinpoint the flaw.

"So you chose Sri Lanka_?" she asks again, some accusation in her voice now._

"You think I should have gone to Vegas?" he asks, the corner of his mouth quirking up.

"That's not what I meant," she says quietly, and turns to look out into the dark night again.

Angel stands and joins her at the window. He wants to touch her, but that's not what this is for, so he just lets his hands rest on the cool windowsill; there's perspiration on the stone from the water in the air, it's that humid here. Outside, they can see beautiful lush trees and marshy paddy fields, and elegant sloping Asian architecture, more of the monastery where Angel is staying rising up around them.

"This country is torn by war, Angel," she says softly. "Why would you come here to heal?" 

They can't hear any shooting or bombing, but that's not because there isn't any. Buffy is right: Sri Lanka is a country plagued by intense civil war, all around them.

"I can't believe this is the only country with a bunch of monks to hang out with," she adds.

He doesn't answer her question. Instead, he says, not looking at her, "If it were really you I were talking to, you wouldn't know that about Sri Lanka."

She frowns, hurt. "Hey. I know stuff."

He smiles at her, kindly, sadly. "I know you do, sweetheart. But world politics isn't really your area of expertise."

She smiles begrudgingly. "Okay. True." She sobers. "But you are. And don't think I didn't notice you weaseling around the issue. So what's up, huh?" 

He turns away again. He can't bear to look at her while he's killing her.

"I just wanted to go someplace that was grieving the same way I am. Someplace with a broken heart."

Angel wakes in a fevered daze, gasping for air he doesn't need. Before he can help himself, he looks to the window: the curtains are drawn and there's no girl standing there shaming him.

As far as he knows, she's still in the ground rotting, dead at twenty because he wasn't there to save her . . .

He buries his face in his hands before he makes himself sick. Again.

He can smell dawn on the horizon, can feel it itching under his skin. The demon in him wants to hide, to burrow back under the covers where the sun can't possibly find him and to seek healing slumber, but the bells will ring soon for morning meditation, and he'll have to be jarred from sleep again. And worse: there may be more dreams, and he's fairly certain that if he has to endure more than one a morning, he'll go insane.

So he forces himself out of bed and dresses. His clothes are cotton, light, but the air is so wet and hot that they're a little damp even as he puts them on, just from being out. Beneath his bare feet the stone floors are cool and slightly wet with condensation . . . just like the windowsill in his dream. Not everything is make-believe.

He's just finished dressing when the bells ring, just as he'd thought. He walks downstairs – he's learned to get anywhere in shadow – to the prayer hall. Many of the monks are there already, already sitting in meditation, but he's the first Westerner there. He usually is. The other Americans and Europeans staying at the monastery are serious about studying Buddhism – some more than others, but they're all there for a reason – but the spirit is more willing than the body, and five o'clock in the morning is very early. Ven. Upali nods to Angel, and he nods back; abstaining from unnecessary speaking is one of the eight precepts to follow for pure meditation, and besides, Angel is heavy enough with grief that he doesn't want to burden himself further with words. The man is the monastery's head and also the reason Angel chose Siyane Vipassana from all the meditation centers in Sri Lanka; Angel knows the man from his first trek through the country, when Upali was a novice monk and Angel was struggling with the bitterness of his soul and not a broken heart. Upali is an old man now, but he's truly achieved peace through the lessons of the Buddha, and when Angel shows up on his doorstep having not aged a day since their last meeting, he doesn't blink. Someplace peaceful, someplace quiet – _someplace with a broken heart_, Angel thinks before he can help it – is one thing, but someone you can trust is a gem beyond price, and even as pained as he is, Angel is grateful for Upali's presence.

Angel sits on the stone floor, closes his eyes, and forces himself to breathe. It's funny, in a kind of really unfunny way, that he should end up in a temple devoted to Mahasi Buddhism: the entire meditation practice is centered around breathing, which he doesn't do because he's dead. For the first few minutes of every meditation cycle, he has to work on his breathing until he's got it regular enough that he can ignore it in order to meditate properly.

Upali told him yesterday that he has too much anger in him to find a path to Enlightenment, and that he needs to spend more time on the Four Protections, reflections for meditation. Angel spends at least eight hours a day, every day, meditating, but Upali has told him it isn't enough; Angel would be frustrated, but then he reminds himself that this is exactly the sort of attitude a monk is likely to have.

He balks, however, at the Four Protections, because he can only get through three of them on a good day and one on a bad. Upali knows this; he knows the reason Angel has come to Sri Lanka, knows why he finds comfort instead of challenge in the limitations of the precepts. But he also knows that there's no way to heal a wound by hiding it away.

Somewhere, Angel knows this, too.

The first Protection is never difficult. It is devoting one's self to the Buddha by appreciating his nine qualities. Angel does not worship Buddha, but he recognizes worth in the tenets of Buddhism, and there are no hidden barbs within the first Protection, so it always comes easily: _Truly, the Buddha is holy, fully enlightened, perfect in knowledge and conduct, a welfarer, world-knower, the incomparable leader of men to be tamed, teacher of gods and mankind, the awakened one and the exalted one._

Angel meditates on this Protection for a long time, because no one is ever rushed in meditation, he could stay unmoving in the prayer hall until dusk if he wanted, and because today – he can tell already, from the way he was woken this morning, from the sick feeling still clawing at his belly that he can't seem to shake with _the body is intangible, it is worth nothing_ – is going to be a bad day.

The second Protection is harder, and he misses the point just about every time. He is meant to reflect upon the nature of sentient beings, and to identify himself with all sentient beings without distinction, but there is a word that he snags on at the end of the first sentence, and he just gets caught on it and cannot move far enough to be anyone but himself, screaming.

_May I be free from enmity, disease and grief. As I am, so also may my parents, preceptors, teachers, intimate and indifferent and inimical beings be free from enmity, disease and grief. May they be released from suffering._

He hits "grief" and he can't be at harmony with anyone, because there's no harmony within his own body, there's nothing but Willow standing in the lobby of the Hyperion, nothing but Buffy's neck twisted at a wrong angle and her grave that he can't get near because they consecrated the earth, nothing but the human life with the woman he loves that he gave up to keep all this from happening, gone for nothing, two years he could have had with her, two whole years of making love to her and seeing her in the sun and waking up beside her, his face in her hair, her hands curled around him.

He's forgotten to keep his fake breathing going, and he can't do it anymore or he's going to be sick. He feels feverish. He's supposed to work through the Protection until he masters it, but if he has to think about grief anymore . . . he moves to the third one. 

The third Protection is to diminish the unwholesome attachment some people have to the body. He's supposed to reflect on the body's "repulsive nature," to think of intestines and pus and everything unbeautiful and unclean about it . . . but all he can think is of the wrong angle of Buffy's neck, and of the undertaker embalming her, cutting his girl open, and then he's almost sick again . . .

The fourth Protection he cannot get through even on a good day.

_Death is ever approaching. Life is uncertain, but death is certain; life is precarious but death is sure. Life has death as its goal. There is birth, disease, suffering, old age, and eventually, death. These are all aspects of the process of existence._

He's been here for two and a half months and still he cannot get through the fourth Protection on a good day, though he tries every day, every meditation cycle. He is panting, straining under the pressure of the sentiments, under the churning sick feeling in his stomach. Suddenly, there's a gentle warm weight on his shoulder; he turns, surprised, opening his eyes. Upali is crouched beside him, his hand on Angel's shoulder.

The old man speaks quietly.

"You cannot walk down a path you do not see," he says in Tamil. He speaks flawless English, but never to Angel, who doesn't want to talk to any of the other Westerners, and thus has not spoken a word of English since he arrived.

"I'm trying," Angel responds. He is. He's not far from punishing himself.

"It is not enough."

"What more can I do?"

The monk's gaze is difficult to bear. "That is for you to discover."

It's pouring rain outside. It makes plastic noises as it pelts the dense tropics foliage, pots-and-pans music as it thrums against the curved roofs of the monastery.

There's a distinct possibility that it will drive Angel the last few miles to insanity.

He can't sleep, and he sure as hell can't meditate or read or do anything but toss and turn on his tiny bed and be tortured by the noise and the wetness and the thick earth smell it leaves in the air. Almost metal, almost like blood. He's hungry, but he's so angry that such a small reminder can push him so far that he won't eat, even though Upali keeps fresh blood for him in the kitchen downstairs. 

"You can't walk down a path you don't see," a clear voice says, startling him. If his heart were beating, he might have had an attack. "What about blind people? Don't the monks care about them?"

Buffy's sitting at the edge of the bed in the white dress from the other night, her feet still bare but her hair loose around her shoulders.

He's pretty sure he is having an attack.

He sits up, partly from habit – it's impolite to address a woman from the flat of your back, and foolish to let a predator see you that way – partly because he wants to be as close to her as possible, because he didn't notice she was there until she spoke. He can't smell her, can't hear her heartbeat or feel her warmth.

Also, he just . . . wants to.

"It's a parable," he says stiltedly. "He didn't mean it literally; he meant that I cannot do something I'm not at all prepared for." 

She does not look completely satisfied by this explanation. "Oh. Why didn't he just say that?" She rolls her eyes. "Cryptic."

He eyes her strangely; she looks entirely too real for a dead girl. He can count her freckles.

"I thought you liked cryptic guys," he says finally.

The corner of her mouth quirks. "Cad."

He can't help himself; he lays his hand on her arm. She feels warm, real. He feels something tighten painfully in his chest and he thinks he may have made a noise out loud.

Buffy looks at him, surprised, but he's not sure if it's from his movement or the noise he may or may not have made. 

"You can't be here," he accuses suddenly, panicked. 

She looks calm. "Why not?"

He doesn't want to say it, because saying it makes it true, and he's gone halfway around the world to try and heal his heart from the wound. But he has to say it or further suffer this madness.

"Because you're dead," he chokes.

Her berry swell mouth puckers into a pout. "So are you."

"But you—"

She looks cross. "So you figure, what, you're just hallucinating me?" 

"I don't know. Yes? Or you're haunting me, but I figure you'd have better things to do with your afterlife than haunt me—" 

She points an indignant finger at him. "You'd better believe it, mister."

They sit for a moment in an uncomfortable silence. Finally Angel, unhinged, desperate, turns and takes Buffy by the waist, pulls her body against his, crushes his mouth against hers. She resists at first, surprised, but then relaxes into the kiss; surprisingly, he pulls away first.

"Do you kiss all your hallucinations?" she asks breathlessly.

"I can't feel you," he whispers, not bothering to mask the accusation in his tone.

She sighs. "Yeah, well, that's not why I'm here. And, you know – like you said – I'm dead, so . . ."

She lowers her eyes to a stray thread on her skirt, suddenly very interesting.

"I'm sorry," he says. 

She looks up. "For kissing me?"

"What? No. No, I'm never sorry for that. I meant for not saving you . . ."

She frowns. "It was my choice, Angel. It wasn't your job to save me. Anyway, that's not why I'm here, no chain-rattling or anything." 

He creases his brow. "Why are you here?"

"To help you with what that monk guy was talking about. Your path. You need to get back on it, and in a hurry. I mean, I'm flattered that you're spending so much time mourning over me, but you've got big important things to do. People to help, worlds to save. And none of it's going to get done while you're on your ass pondering existence in a country with a broken heart."

He starts to reply but finds the words arrest in his throat under her _No Smart Stuff, Mister_ glare.

"What, you think I'd let you screw up your life and forget your mission just because I stepped into the light? Puh-leeze."

Angel sleeps well and doesn't wake until the bells call him to meditation. He doesn't feel shocked anymore, just strangely leaden and wrung through, like after crying . . . but that could be because of the rain, too; his clothes are heavy with moisture. He walks through the corridors to the prayer hall in a kind of slow daze, thinking over the events of the previous evening. He's not sure if it was a dream. If he wants it to be.

It takes him two hours, but he gets through all four Protections. Then he goes back to his room and packs his things to go home.

**Part Two: Strange and Wonderful  
Los Angeles, California, 2004**

"You're not real."

Buffy paid three hundred extra dollars for the flight that would get her to Los Angeles the quickest – it was still fifteen damn hours from Rome, not that quick – and Angel's first words upon seeing her in the doorway of his hospital room are, "You're not real."

The nurse who brought her to Angel's room squeezes her arm reassuringly. "He's on quite a bit of morphine, dear."

Buffy relaxes some. "Oh."

Angel looks horrible, but seeing him all beat to shit is just the latest in a long line of shockers: getting a phone call from his grown _son_ – Angel has a _son_? She'd nearly dropped the phone, and it took her a full minute to find words upon meeting the boy. – learning about his suicide mission, about his shanshu curse that had ended him human in a hospital broken and frankly lucky to be alive . . . well, Buffy was pretty damn jaded by this point.

"Doesn't mean I don't know a hallucination when I'm . . . hallucinating it," Angel mumbles, his slurred speech lending not a small amount of credence to the nurse's _he's on morphine_ theory.

"I'll just leave you two alone," the nurse offers cheerily, shutting the door behind her as she bustles out of the room.

"So," Buffy says brightly, coming to sit on the edge of Angel's bed. "You look like hell. Three broken ribs, couple of smashed fingers, some second-degree burns, a little thoracic surgery, not to mention that bruise on your cheekbone, which is stunning." She smiles falsely under his glare before continuing. "Am I missing anything important?" 

"Stitches," he says, still sounding drunk but not afraid to rise to her challenge. "Not counting the ones from my surgery, I have a hundred and eight, all of them itchy. My favorites are the ones in my eye." He motions with a bandaged hand – broken fingers, burns – to his brow bone, which is, indeed, crisscrossed with stitches. "And these, in my mouth." He taps a railroad track of black thread just below his bottom lip.

"They're lovely."

"I feel like Frankenstein."

"You're pulling off a decent impression."

He scowls. "Thanks for the sympathy."

"Hey," she says with mock defense. "I'm all about sympathy. I just flew across an ocean to come sympathize. And you accused me of being a hallucination."

He smiles fondly at her. "You provide excellent conversation for a hallucination."

"You've had too much morphine." 

With a lack of reserve that Buffy attributes to the drugs in his system, Angel reaches up and lets the pads of his fingers trace her face, laze over her throat and collarbone. Buffy is surprised, both by his brazenness and by the fact that she is thrilled by the touch and doesn't want him to stop.

"It's possible," he murmurs languidly.

"Speaking of which," she says hurriedly, feeling a blush coming to the surface of her skin and wanting to distract Angel from it, "As soon as you are feeling better, you can count on being punished; I cannot _believe_ you didn't tell me about this whole I-get-to-be-a-real-boy prophecy thing. Or your _son_ . . ."

"I didn't tell you about my son to protect him, it wasn't about you—" He frowns. "How do you know about Connor?"

Her mouth purses. "He called me. That's why I'm here."

Angel's brows raise. He flinches immediately: the movement pulls at his stitches. "He called you?"

"Yeah. After he checked you into the hospital – you remember him pulling you out of the rubble?" 

Angel's countenance darkens. "I do. Damn foolish, following me, he could have been killed—"

"He saved your life."

"And risked his. After I explicitly told him not to—"

Suddenly, Buffy laughs. "Wow. You really are his father."

The scowl relaxes from Angel's face. "Well . . . yeah."

"Anyway," she continues, "after he checked you into the hospital, apparently you did your I've-had-too-much-morphine talk thing with him and asked for me. So he got my number from Spike—you know Spike's alive, right? And your blue-haired friend—"

"Illyria," he answers. "Yeah, I've seen them. But we lost Wesley and Gunn." A shadow rolls over his visage again. "And Cordelia and Fred."

Buffy's face softens and she slips her hand over his, being careful of his broken fingers. "I'm so sorry, Angel. I know what they meant to you."

She can see a part of him closing off, right before her eyes. No matter what she means to him, his family meant something that she will never get to touch, and they are all fallen without her taking up arms in their defense. As much as he loves her, he will never forgive her.

"So your Italian playboy just let you fly out here to see me?" Angel asks sharply, shifting unsmoothly from one indelicate subject to another. "I don't recall the Immortal being overly friendly with his things."

Buffy would be incensed, but she sees how hurt he is, and sees the rancor for what it is – a cloaking action, to cover the pain of the previous topic, the pain of _this_ topic. And beyond that, she's confused.

"How do you know about him?" she asks, bewildered, not answering him. She'd figured that Angel's omnipotence would end when they stopped sharing a hemisphere.

He doesn't answer, closed off and brooding, jaw tight.

"Fine," she sighs. "Just keep on keeping things from me, that's fine. Anyway, that's over. That's . . . it's been over. And even if it wasn't, there wasn't a damn thing in this world that would have kept me from you. Are you happy?"

He untenses some. "I'm sorry."

"For what?" she snaps. "For being foul to me now, or for withholding things from me for a year, or for going on this stupid kamikaze mission and nearly getting yourself killed? Don't you think I would have been here in a second with every weapon at my disposal? Haven't I always, always had your back? Haven't I—"

Angel's eyes flash and he grabs her arm forcefully enough that she stops speaking, stilled by a jerk of surprise gripping through her chest.

"A whole year," he growls, voice low, intimate and deadly. "A whole year I have been rotting out here on my own. I have called and begged your people for help and I have been denied it in every sort of language that they could come up with. I have lost battles and _family_ because of it, and I was supposed to think that this time was _different_? Why?"

He shakes her once with all the strength afforded to him – not much – and releases her, his eyes burning with more hurt than rage. Buffy is speechless, numb.

"I didn't know," she says finally.

He doesn't say anything, just stares at her mute and livid.

"Angel, I wouldn't have left you out here to die, you have to believe that."

"Why? Why do I have to believe that? I have a whole lot of evidence to the contrary. Bodies. I have bodies to the contrary."

Buffy doesn't know what to say, and it's so difficult to operate underneath the enraged intensity of his gaze that it's almost as if time has slowed for her.

"I didn't know," she repeats when she can find her voice again, the words squeaking out at nearly a whimper.

Angel lowers his head enough that she knows he doesn't believe her. Buffy doesn't realize how much this affects her until she hears a weak noise escape her own throat, and then she's suddenly rising from Angel's bed and grabbing her purse, heading to the door with her face turned away so that he won't be able to see her like this.

"So that's it?" he demands of her fleeing back, his voice strangely clarion, free from the impurities of drugs or anger. "You're going to run off and leave me all alone to prove to me that you're always here for me?" 

She freezes in the doorframe.

"You can be such an asshole," she whispers. "I don't know when that happened, when you stopped treating me delicately."

_Later than I should have,_ Angel thinks. Aloud, he says, "But I'm not wrong." 

Buffy turns back to him. "No."

She comes back and sits back beside him on his bed. Allowing herself to borrow his lack of inhibitions from earlier, she places one hand on his shoulder, uses one to slide the rounded edge of his jaw into the cup of her palm to direct his gaze to her. Angel looks surprised but not displeased, not even guarded – all of his defenses are still down from their argument; he's still raw and naked.

"Let's make each other a deal, right here and now. From now on, we'll be completely open, completely honest: no more secrets. And we'll always, always have each other's backs. What do you say?"

He hesitates.

"It's going to take a lot for me to heal," he says stiltedly. "Not a pretty road ahead."

"I know," she says gently. "But I can be here for that."

He nods cautiously. "Okay. Deal."

She smiles. "Good. Deal."

_Reflect upon the repulsive nature of the body to assist you in diminishing the unwholesome attachment that so many people have for it. Dwell upon some of its impurities, such as stomach, intestines, phlegm, pus, and blood. Ponder these impurities so that the absurd fondness of the body may be eliminated._

She'd taken care of Angel before. When Spike used his life force to restore Drusilla, when he came back from hell, when Faith poisoned him. Never like this. Angel was still stoic, but he'd nearly been killed, and a human body _hurt_ so badly and healed so slowly . . . he'd been badly hurt when he'd come back from hell, but he'd been so psychologically numb and she'd seen him so infrequently that this was a completely different experience, this being with him constantly, watching his Technicolor pain.

He stayed in the hospital for a week after she arrived from Rome. She visited every day, sitting with him and talking with him and Connor and Spike and Illyria – although talking _with_ Illyria was somewhat of a loose concept – learning from the nurses how to take care of Angel when he was ready to go home, and when he was released, he was released to her. They made base camp in her hotel room – down the hall from Connor's – since he no longer had an apartment, hers was in Rome, and she very much doubted that sharing a living space with Spike and Illyria would be conducive to healing. (She had, however, been _tickled_ to hear they were living together). 

She changes his bandages and applies ointment to his burns and stitches. Sometimes he sits patiently, but if he's tired or in more pain than usual he writhes from her touch like a child having a splinter removed. She is surprised by his impatience, but she understands that it must be beyond frustrating for him to have broken bones in his chest and hands when he's used to being virtually indestructible, to have wounds still weeping for days and days that before would have healed in minutes. She understands – less, but still somewhere in her periphery – that he's impatient about things beyond his failing body, about the fact that they sleep beside one another at night but that she only puts her hands on him clinically, to check the soundness of his stitches or to rewrap a dressing.

She wonders if he's missing _her_ frustration in this area because he's not a vampire and can't smell her constant arousal, or hear her pulse forever elevated, or because he just doesn't care to notice.

Or if he hasn't missed it at all, and this is just needling him further, that she wants him too and won't do anything about it.

_May I be free from enmity, disease and grief. As I am, so also may my parents, preceptors, teachers, intimate and indifferent and inimical beings be free from enmity, disease and grief. May they be released from suffering._

They've been in the hotel a week when Connor has to go back to school. Angel is crushed but tries very hard not to show it. Buffy and Angel take him to the airport and see him off; the ride back in Buffy's rental car is murder, Angel silent and sullen pressed against the passenger's side door, staring out the window. He's worse when they get back to the hotel, sitting in an armchair not reading the same page of a book for an hour. 

Buffy's supposed to change the dressings on his hands tonight, but she's pretty sure he won't be able to handle that, so she just leaves him alone until dinner time, when she tries to coax him to eat and take his antibiotics. They don't have a conversation about it and he just dry swallows the pills but doesn't eat, then gets sick from taking the pills on an empty stomach, spending twenty minutes on his hands and knees on the cold tile floor of their hotel room's bathroom. Buffy starts to be angry with him, but he's upset enough by this time that he allows himself to be comforted, so instead of raging she rubs his back while he brings up the pills, then holds him and lets him apologize when he's finished.

"I've been not the best guy to be around the past week," he mumbles against her blouse.

Her fingers slide through dark tangles of his hair. Touching him like that, holding him like this, it all feels much, much more comfortable than it should.

"It's okay," she murmurs.

"It's not. I—"

"I can't imagine becoming human all of a sudden is a picnic."

"But I wanted this. I'm just not really handling it with extraordinary grace." He looks up at her; he looks vaguely flushed and unsteady, but earnest. He's trying hard to focus. "And you've been amazing. I'm sorry."

He falls against her again, embraces her again. It's so _strange_ to be holding Angel and to feel all this warmth and this breath on her flesh and this heartbeat pounding against her, and to know it's his. Strange and wonderful. There are butterflies in her stomach. 

She realizes suddenly that she hasn't really felt his heartbeat before because she hasn't held him until now and worries – no, more than that, _panics_ – a flush going over her. She draws away from him while she can still help herself.

"Maybe we should get you ready for bed, okay?" she implores breathlessly. 

Angel looks confused, almost hurt, but he agrees compliantly. "Okay . . ."

She helps him up off the floor and into his pajamas, which she's managed to desex into another healthcare issue. While he's in the bathroom brushing his teeth, she turns down the bed and then collapses onto it, breathing hard. She is on _fire_. Just from a hug? Apparently so.

"Get a grip, Buffy," she mutters.

"You say something?" Angel asks, coming out of the bathroom.

She performs a plastic smile. "Nuh-uh. Not me."

He frowns briefly but ultimately decides to believe her; the frown fades from his visage and he lets her help him into bed without comment. Buffy hurriedly switches off the light and then slips to the furthest edge of the bed, on her side, praying to fall asleep quickly before she can feel his breath on her neck or anything else can happen to get her worked up again. 

No one, apparently, is listening to her prayers, because after a moment Angel scoots closer to her, rests one of his hands on her hip. Scooting is not easy for him, so this was a _plan_; her breath catches in her chest.

"You okay?" he asks quietly. 

"What?" she squeaks. "Fine."

"You don't sound fine. And you're all bunched over on the far end of the bed . . . is it . . . is it because I threw up? I—"

He sounds hurt enough that a pang of guilt runs through her. She turns around to look at him while she apologizes; she turns right into his arms, right against his chest.

"Oh," she murmurs, surprised. It takes her a moment to regain her footing: "I mean, no, Angel, of course not, I just—"

Angel doesn't really care. Now that Buffy is so close to him, half in his arms, all pressed against him, so close that he can feel the flush raised on her skin, he doesn't want to hear an apology. Instead, he presses his lips against hers, slow, sweet, long. He's been waiting to do that since he figured out she wasn't a hallucination.

Buffy loses all her breath; she's so light-headed just from his boldness and from the electric thrill of his touch that for a moment she fears she's going to pass out. If she had to start putting stock in things like karma and kismet, she would _swear_ that Angel was _made_ to kiss her, because no one else had ever made her feel a fraction of the dizzy that he does, and the spell never breaks even a little, no matter how much time they spend apart, no matter the circumstances under which they come together.

Angel is panting when he breaks off. She wants to laugh, because he's human now and can lose his breath, too. Also, she wants to hit him for kissing her in the first place.

Mostly, though, she wants to kiss him again. 

"I've been thinking about doing that pretty much every waking moment since I saw you standing in my hospital room doorway," he whispers, not moving far from kissing her, his lips tickling the sensitive flesh of hers.

She can't help herself; she feels so full of exhilaration. She laughs, and allows herself to touch him, wrapping her arms around his waist, his back, holding him against her.

"How was it?" she asks throatily.

"You kiss much better than a hallucination," he says, and then he laughs, which is insane – to hear Angel laughing, just from joy, like a regular person – but wonderful.

She kisses him again – quickly, not trusting herself to become drunk on his kisses yet – and then very carefully shifts him from his side to his back, straddles him at his waist. She pulls his tee shirt off over his head – Angel eyes her speculatively, but doesn't say anything – and then settles over him again, her hands on his shoulders, his pectorals, her mouth falling over his again, kissing him hungrily. He holds her at the waist, his hands moving up and down lazily . . . over her back, her stomach, the undersides of her breasts. He kisses her back eagerly, but when she starts nipping at him, holding his jaw fast to her, he pulls away gently and murmurs her name.

"What's wrong?" she asks, a stab of panic going through her. There's always something, they always have to stop, she can never have him, and now she's burning all the way through and she has to stay here with him and not touch him, what is she going to _do_?

"I appreciate your enthusiasm," Angel replies gently, "but I have three broken ribs. Could we maybe slow down a little? We have plenty of time. A lifetime."

Buffy is flooded with relief; she grins as the sweet feeling flows throughout her. "Oh. Sure. Great. Yes."

Angel laughs again and closes his arms around her as she slides over him again. They're going to be fine. It'll be a hell of a ride.


End file.
